Marx’s Value Theory Revisited. A ‘Value-form’ Approach

The above analysis may be summarised as follows:

 

a) Marx formulated a monetary theory of value; this theory constitutes a radical critique of (a rupture from) the Ricardian theory of value (conceived as ‘labour expended’). It constitutes the Marxian economic theory par excellence, which shall be further developed by Marxists, as it is te only theory that can critically interpret contemporary capitalism.

 

b) The dominant interpretation of Marx’s theory by Marxists is ‘Ricardian’, in the sense that it ignores Marx’s monetary approach, it misinterprets Marx’s elaborations on the abstraction level of ‘surplus-labour’ (forgetting Marx’s warning that ‘capital has not invented surplus-labour’), and focuses on the weak points of Marx’s writings, like, e.g., the ‘transformation of values into prices of production’.

 

c) The existence of ambiguities or contradictions should be expected not only for Marx but also for any theory that emerges as a radical theoretical critique of an established system of thought.

 

d) Marxian theory is attenuated when Marxists do not comprehend Marx’s ambivalences towards Political Economy, i.e. the existence of conceptual contradictions and, much more important, of a second, non-Marxist, discourse in his writings. Every ‘sanctifying’ attitude towards Marx, presenting him as the blameless master who never made a single false step, practically obscures the scientific substance of Marx’s main Discourse, his Critique of Political Economy. It thus fetches up a ‘Ricardian Marxism’, which means nothing less than the displacement of Marxist theory by alien to it theoretical discourses (Classical Political Economy or other forms of bourgeoisie theoretical discourse). The duty and role of the Marxist theoretician should be, among other things, to clarify these dead ends in Marx’s work, in the course of further developing Marxist theory.